brightpearl Archives • 99rabbits

July 7, 2016

Brightpearl Private App Creation How To

Another use case from one of our clients: Shopify and Brightpearl new order check.

As I’ve already posted in Brightpearl issues piece, occasionally, orders from Shopify aren’t downloaded to Brightpearl. This situation is very rare but quite annoying. Unfortunately, BP doesn’t have built-in notifications for this case. Also, sometimes order total in BP may differ from that in the original order in Shopify. This happens when some of your Shopify products are missing from BP. We can fix these issues with our custom Brightpearl private app. Here’s a short manual for store administrators on how to create such app.

May 23, 2016

Shopify & Brightpearl Product Generator Template

We’ve created 7000+ products at our Shopify store since moving to this ecommerce platform. This is a lot of manual work to do! So in the process, we’ve developed a Google Spreadsheet template I’d like to share with you. It uses some quite advanced formulas (like ArrayFormula and Regexreplace) and requires some time to get it. However, we managed to teach our not so nerdy content manager to use it, which means you probably can do it too 😉

I’ve built a simplified public copy of our template, which can be found here. Feel free to copy and modify it to your needs. If you don’t use Brightpearl ERP, feel free to delete sheets ‘5’ and ‘5.1’ (cause they may slow down your doc a bit).

Next, I’m going to explain how to use the template.

May 20, 2016

Brightpearl issues and how to fix them

I decided to list known Brightpearl issues and ways to fix or avoid them. Some of them require you only to install a Chrome extension or sign into your Google account, while to implement others you may need to involve someone familiar with the API concepts and in possession of basic programming skills. Fortunately, we now offer Brightpearl automation services and can help you with that.

Brightpearl is a SAAS ERP built for multichannel ecommerce. It includes inventory management, sales and purchase orders tracking and accounting. The suite significantly improved our business processes after we’ve implemented it in July 2014 at our online lingerie store.

February 11, 2016

Novaposhta tracking automated

We use Brightpearl inventory management software for our e-commerce business. Here’s another post from the Brightpearl Automation series, where we share our experience of business process automation with Corezoid cloud OS.

Novaposhta is the leader in express delivery in Ukraine. Most e-commerce businesses here are using their services. They also have a documented API, which is open to all customers after registration. We use it to track sent package states and switch sales order statuses accordingly.

Novaposhta’s API also allows registering packages before sending them to get a tracking reference and make sure order recipient data is correct. We’ll focus on that a bit later.

Novaposhta tracking and shipped order sms notification

When a sales order is shipped, we want to notify our customer about this event and start following package states until it is received. We used to send text notifications via native Clickatell integration and then manually check parcel state at our primary carrier Nova Poshta website. Naturally, our managers were doing parcel state check on rare occasions. Therefore, we were not able to identify orders that needed special attention soon enough. The thing is, cash-on-delivery orders are most frequent here in Ukraine because of an immature credit card payments market. So we have to track which order hasn’t been received yet and remind a customer to do it.

Here’s what we’ve done to tackle this problem. When a sales order (SO) is shipped, our Corezoid automation:

sends an SMS to customer mobile number via Unisender SMS gateway, which is two times cheaper than Clickatell (for local Ukrainian mobile numbers) and at the same time is more reliable;
posts the SMS text, including parcel tracking number, as an order note for future reference;
changes order status to ‘Arrived at warehouse’ when the parcel has arrived at the destination warehouse (our clients usually choose delivery to their local carrier’s office);
changes order status to ‘Delivered’ when the customer has received the package or to ‘Completed’ if the order has already been completely paid.

It took hours to check manually package state at our carrier website for each order before the automation. Now we don’t have to worry about it.

February 10, 2016

Warning! Boxora.com shipment bug

Is there anyone using the boxora app? We’ve stumbled upon a potentially dangerous bug, and that seems to be unsolved.

February 1, 2016

Shopify to Brightpearl order download issue

Our client’s Shopify store connects to Brightpearl ERP with it’s internal app. It syncs inventory and Shopify orders and can download products created in Shopify. Occasionally, orders aren’t downloaded to Brightpearl. This situation is very rare but quite annoying. Unfortunately, BP doesn’t have built-in notifications for this case. So we’ve created it.

November 17, 2015

Connect Twilio, Unisender, MessageBird or other sms gateways to Brightpearl

We use Brightpearl inventory management software in our ecommerce business. Here’s another post from my Brightpearl Automation series.

Ecommerce stores normally send various sms notifications to their customers. These include: ‘your order has been shipped’, ‘we couldn’t reach you by phone, please call back’, ‘your payment has been received successfully’ etc. This is a good way to communicate crucial information to your customers, especially if they don’t rely so much on email, as does our typical customer here in Ukraine.

November 17, 2015

Brightpearl Automation

I’ve been using Brightpearl ERP since the mid-2014 at my online store Alisa.ua. It’s a great SAAS ERP for e-commerce that literally changed everything about how we do things and significantly improved our processes.

However, there’re still a lot of stuff in Brightpearl we’d like to improve or completely automate. For example, we wanted to integrate it with our local package carrier Nova Poshta. Also, we had a depressing experience with BP’s native sms gateway Clickatell. BP team have told me that they don’t have plans to add other gateways. So I started looking for solutions… And I found one.

We now use Corezoid to build Brightpearl automation workflows. It’s a service that lets you create your own applications connecting various apps via API. You do it by creating visual process scheme so you don’t have to write code (maybe you’ll have to copy/paste a few lines of JavaScript). Naturally, it’s a cloud platform, plus it’s cheap, runs on Amazon servers and allows non-programmers to quickly make necessary adjustments on the go.

Here’s what we’ve implemented with Corezoid so far (updated 05/19/16):

New order check and customer notification for a Shopify store; Including copying order notes from Shopify cart, which aren’t being transferred to BP since some time ago.
Created basic Brightpearl and Novaposhta carrier integration.
Product List + Inventory summary + Price list export to a CSV file for our 40k+ SKU product database.
Custom automatic product download from Shopify.
Custom order packing and shipping interface with barcode scanner support.
Real-time shipping date calculation for our Shopify store (based on warehouse availability).
Inventory sync patch for warehouses that don’t have BP’s native product allocation enabled (long story which deserves a post of its own).
Replaced Clickatell for shipped order sms notification with Unisender;
Order due date check. Notify our staff if an order in progress doesn’t have a due date.
Order status update as a text message to a customer.
Conditions based automatic order status change. ‘Waiting for a customer’ → ‘Call the customer’.
Automatic client notification if the order is waiting for payment more than two business days.
Created other various order status based automations.

BTW, we choose Unisender as a text message service, but you quickly can connect Twilio to Brightpearl.

Brightpearl automation services

We now offer Brightpearl automation services for ecommerce business owners. If you’re interested in one of the patches I described here or some custom development, please drop me a line at stas@99rabbits.com. You’ll be amazed how these automation flows can streamline your operations and how cost-effective they are.